What's For Dinner?

Max Spoor chairs the Department of Agrarian and Environmental Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague (part of Erasmus University Rotterdam). Max specializes in economies in transition. He describes the motivations of consumers and the predicament of small food producers who together make up the massive food sovereignty movement around the globe. He sees national and international policy initiatives pushing small food producers into global supply chains, resulting in a tenuous hold on their livelihoods, since the great majority cannot now cover costs of production for their principal crops. Max has recently been involved in institutional capacity-building projects in China, Kazakhstan and Vietnam and consultancy missions in nearly a dozen developing countries.

Lori Hylton is a Presbyterian Hunger Fellow in the New York Hudson River Presbytery and Jed Koball is Presbyterian mission co-worker in Lima, Peru. As participants in Joining Hands Against Hunger Peru (JHAH-PERU), an ecumenical and democratic network of organizations and churches throughout Peru, Lori and Jed are organizing to halt Fast Track and the multilateral proposed TPP after seeing investor state protections in the bilateral Peru USA Free Trade agreement invoked against Peru. JHAH-PERU documented poisoning of children in the 35,000 person town of la Oroya by a multi-metal smelter run by the Renco Group. It reneged on an agreement to reduce environmental levels of lead, cadmium and arsenic levels and is suing the state of Peru for $800 million of alleged lost profits.

Jennifer Clapp is Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at University of Waterloo, Canada. She explains why food leaders wrote How We Count Hunger Matters in response to the UN's FAO's State of Food Insecurity 2012. It underrepresented world hunger, and the trend line implied progress toward meeting the Millennium Development goal of reducing hunger by 2015. Jennifer describes the preferred alternative for counting hunger - including everyone affected by life conditions as they are really lived under current conditions of global change. The interview demonstrates the way defining the goal and the problem shape what you count, and the way these leaders confronted the prevailing aid and development paradigms.

Ed Fredrickson uses a toolkit from 20 years research with USDA's Agricultural Research Service to help Kentucky farmers develop uses of beef and other livestock to improve Kentucky family farms' profitability and sustainability. Expert in desert ecology and nutrition/behavior of range livestock, Ed researched desert-adapted cattle in North Africa for a breed suited to hotter weather and desertified, fragile ecosystems. He then collaborated with a researcher from the Universidad Autonoma de Chihuahua to focus on the Criollo, cattle raised by Tarahumara Indians in the Copper Canyon region of Chihuahua, Mexico to provide milk, meat and draft in Mexico. Their bodies seem to partition energy in ways more suited to arid areas, and they distribute their impact more evenly across landscapes because they graze more widely in rougher country.

David Gumpert and Ben Grosscup preview Northeast Organic Farming Association's 2013 summer conference, introducing the raw milk workshop and defining this premier meeting's goals. Much happens in 3 days. Farmers, gardeners, teachers, activists, lawyers, young and old, families and public officials share information about farming as a livelihood and about raising, marketing and using food and forage. They bring experience and strategies for civic engagement to preserve seeds, markets and democratic principles. David came to raw milk research and writing from the business press and has just published Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights: The Escalating Battle Over Who Decides What We Eat. Ben is NOFA's Education Events and Summer Conference Coordinator who comes from student activism.

Amber Heckelman is documenting climate resilience of rice varieties developed by Philippine rice farmers and scientists to reverse negative results of Green Revolution practices. After Green Revolution seeds, fertilizers and pesticides left Philippine subsistence rice farmers a narrower, inadequate resource base to survive, farmers learned to re-hybridize, test and plant native rice varieties. They re-attained food security, and the collaboration grew to include 563 member organizations, 38 NGO and 15 scientist partners. Their rice varieties display superior drought, salt and pest-resistance. Amber is documenting these results as PhD work in environmental studies in collaboration with MASIPAG, which means "industrious" in Tagalog - Farmer-Scientist Partnership for Development.

Ernesto Mendez is a University of Vermont professor whose specialty is Agroecology and Rural Livelihoods. Imagine undergraduates, faculty and graduate students, Vermont farmers, researchers, Latin American coffee growers, and agricultural extension agents all collaborating in a loose network of work and study. They learn how ecosystems where food is grown can produce food without compromising water, air and soil quality. Imagine this happening in classrooms and on farms where they apply on-the-ground farming knowledge plus environmental studies, soil science, anthropology, sociology, ecology, ecological economics, gender and food systems studies. Their mutual work produces results to help farmers adapt to climate change and to make the food system more sustainable. Ernesto describes a real network like this, which is as productive, challenging and exciting as it sounds.

Donnie Nelson is a rancher/farmer experiencing the monumental fracking of the Bakken shale in northwest North Dakota. His family "has had oil and gas development on our place since exploration and drilling began in North Dakota during the 1950's", but never like this. Fracking is sickening animals. Dust from thousands of truck trips cover crops and landscape. The way of life has disappeared. Nelson chairs the Western Organization of Resource Councils' Oil and Gas Campaign Team. The ranch is 70 miles from Williston, the oil boom town where McDonald's workers get $300 to sign on and Halliburton is using a massive mobile housing complex from the Canada Winter Olympics.

Peter Michaelson & Paul Sobocinski on the Beef and Pork Checkoffs Cattlemen first put money into a checkoff for product promotion in the 1920's, but since the mid '80s, the checkoffs have been required and also the subject of much dispute with large producers on one side and smaller, family scale producers on the other. In 2011 a rancher and a hog farmer long in the business talked about checkoffs, these industry-funded, generic research and marketing programs meant to increase demand for an industry's agricultural commodity.

Mark Kastel is the Executive Director of Cornucopia Institute, the watch dog of "big organics." Organic food is the fastest growing segment of the food industry - but the biggest players are not the sustainable kind that raise food without a lot of off farm inputs. Big conventional food companies have acquired more than 60 formerly independent organic companies and dominate the operations of OTA, the trade association of organic companies. Mark talks about the acquisitions by corporations like Kraft and General Mills, the companies that are still independently owned, and what makes 9000 cow organic dairy farms an oxymoron.

Karen Hansen-Kuhn Karen Hansen-Kuhn is tonight's guest. 20 years work on trade and trade policy make her feel it's urgent for the public to learn about and address huge deficiencies in the TransPacific Partnership (now in a late stage of secret negotiations). One instance - it would allow industrial agriculture to undermine sustainable alternatives, since the agreement will prevent types of investment required to make alternatives work. Now at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Karen describes the extraordinary, alarming scope of the agreement, and she explains the secrecy surrounding this proposed agreement - past trade negotiations carried out in public failed because the public knew and protested what was coming down!

Kristi Bahrenberg Janzen Kristi Bahrenberg Janzen is tonight's guest. She is a journalist who married into a Mennonite family that faces the need, faced by many farm families today, to execute a "farm transition" as the generation now farming looks at retirement. Her husband's family own valuable farm buildings, livestock and land in Kansas. Hoping a relative will eventually come forward to farm it, they have already worked for a decade planning for the farm to flourish financially and stay in family hands until then. Karen describes how the family shaped their participative process, and we speculate about whether Mennonite values have facilitated this.

Peter Carstensen Peter Carstensen is tonight's guest. Earlier this year, the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association lost its lawsuit against Monsanto. Lawyer and law school professor Carstensen talks about the next case people hoped would protect farmers from Monsanto in the courts - Bowman v. Monsanto. Carstensen describes the Supreme Court's finding in a patent infringement against Mr. Bowman, the Indiana farmer who purchased and planted soybeans, not from Monsanto, but from a grain elevator. You hear about the finding and its ramifications, the opportunity it gives Congress to act, and how the court appears to have stepped carefully in terms of future cases.

Dave Murphy Dave Murphy is our guest tonight. For him and colleagues at Food Democracy Now, the year 2013 began with Monsanto - a rider protecting it from lawsuits that was attached to the Continuing Resolution to fund government operations. Tonight we go deeper into what's important about current protests against Monsanto. They are not merely against the GM organisms, but against the way the company is able to control what goes into the food by coopting democratic processes for decision making about food and agriculture. Dave describes the exciting breadth of tactics and worldwide scope of anti-Monsanto protests in late spring 2013.

Lorette Picciano Lorette Picciano is tonight's guest. The 2012 Farm Bill is still being debated in late spring 2013, the 7th time Lorette helped craft the Farm Bill, which is debated every 4 years and covers everything from subsidies to food stamps (SNAP) and organics to programs for veterans. Executive Director of the Rural Coalition/Coalición Rural, Lorette works with 70 plus culturally diverse, community-based organizations that represent both farmworkers and small producers from the US and Mexico. They secure civil and human rights in the agriculture and trade sectors - including the lawsuits to gain equity for all farmers and farmworkers from the US Department of Agriculture.

Pat Roy Mooney (Kickstarter and the Glowing Plant) Pat Roy Mooney is tonight's guest. His organization, the ETC Group, is waging the 'KickStopper' campaign against Kickstarter's campaign to fund the glowing plant developed by biohackers using synthetic biology. Mooney explains why release of packets of the plant's seeds through the mail is an irresponsible plan. Ahead of the curve for 40 years in fighting to preserve genetic diversity and keep control of the food supply in public hands, Mooney received the alternative prize to the Nobel Prize. He and colleagues target corporate capture and unaccountable use of technological capabilities - nanotechnology, synthetic biology - through intellectual property rights and patenting.

Michele Simon (Best Public Relations Money can Buy) This week's guest is Michelle Simon, a public health lawyer and author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back (2006). We discuss her "Best Public Relations Money can Buy" report, about the food industry's use of front groups to discredit health arguments as a way to avoid involving their brands in doing dirty work. She gives examples of these campaigns - e.g.fruits and stilettos in vodka ads - and she says citizens overestimate the legal constraints on rebutting false claims. Simon's 2007 report on alcoholic energy drinks led to federal action to ban the products, and her "Food Stamps, Follow the Money" report on food stamps brought attention to industry lobbying.

Adrienne Alstadt, Ellery Kimball, and Jennifer Hashley are greater Boston area farmers (organic produce and livestock) who host teen volunteers - partly to get real work done and partly because adults in the young peoples' lives want them to be there. Father Edgar Guttierez-Duarte, priest of St Luke-San Lucas Episcopal Church, Chelsea, MA, also needs to rely on volunteers as he administers its food pantry and weekly Saturday breakfast. These four also welcome volunteers because they, too, hope the experience will enrich the young people - as individuals, as consumers and eaters, and as human beings in a world where there will probably always be vulnerable people. Teens who do service learning really respond when they meet adults who convey passion about their work - Rita Stevens, age 17, describes how it makes her feel - and these adults do.

Trade issues are Arthur Stamboulis' passion. We discuss what makes trade a major and under-appreciated issue, and we examine the ongoing trade negotiations among countries that border the Pacific Ocean (except China). The TransPacific Partnership (the TPP) will have major implications for the United States and the whole world, since it goes farther than the WTO or NAFTA in curbing national sovereignty, and it will be the model for subsequent agreements. Arthur directs the Citizen's Trade Campaign and approaches trade believing that international trade and investment are not ends unto themselves, but a means for achieving societal goals like economic justice, human rights, healthy communities, and a sound environment. The national coalition he represents includes a broad range of bedfellows - environmental, labor, consumer, family farm, religious, and others - with 12 million combined members from 20 national organizations and 12 state affiliate coalitions.

Nathan Holmes helped found and manages a growers' coop among mostly Amish farmers in Pennsylvania. It's a community of family farms using practices that protect the soil and watershed. The coop lets them farm and not worry about distribution. They can satisfy markets by offering a diversity of crops - and at the same time seek to maintain "a natural agrarian family life and facilitate direct personal experiences of connection between customer, farmer, and land". It sounds like many peoples' dream if they were to farm, but it's a story of regular people who found each other and kept taking the next step. It seems to reflect what's possible today.